But thanks for sharing, I guess?

I don't work with any. I exclusively work on early-stage startups, so all my companies have teams of 3-20. They're also mostly bootstrapped.

I've tried partnering with ex-consultants in the past, but they add no value. They don't have deep industry contacts to sell to. They don't have hands-on experience actually building anything. They make nice PowerPoint presentations, and that's literally it. They constantly over-promise and under-deliver.

They also often demand high salaries at early stages, because they're used to making $300-500k, but that's a whole other issue.

I wasn't being trite. I consider having management consulting (especially MBB) to be a negative on a resume of someone I'm considering working with. It's essentially a disqualifying issue for me after many bad experiences. Maybe the next person is the exception, but it's not worth the risk for me anymore.

Being in leadership is even worse, because you're complicit in destroying so much shareholder value. You charge $100M for something that delivers no real value and costs your firm $10M. Why is that something we should admire?

> Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good.

What are they spectacularly good at, though?

I completely agree that many of them are brilliant, but what skills are they honing, exactly? Brilliance by itself is not enough to make me want to work with someone. Experience is much more useful.

The experience gained tt consulting firms seems to be sales (of a very specific type), making beautiful presentations, and bending data to fit whatever narrative people want it to. Maybe they do some legwork gathering data or running some regressions, but they're usually starting with a preconception of where they should end up.

I have a friend who's a partner at Accenture, and he feels exactly the same way about management consulting that I do: it's bullshit. Another friend at McKinsey described his analyst job as "knowing how to wear a suit and be on time".

I've heard of so many disasters caused by management consultancies. Where are the success stories? At best, they just give a company's managers some data that validates what the company already wants to do, but maybe it's a little too risky.

Somewhere in the middle, perhaps they find a way to sneakily kill a pension program or fire 10,000 people. They're creating value for the company, but it's not exactly work your family will write about in your obituary.

At worst, they burn through piles of cash and accomplish absolutely nothing.

Often MBB consultants are brought in with privileged permissions too - they get access to data, meetings and personnel that internal staff don’t get access to, and the end result is a fancy PowerPoint with a few well-spaced bulletpoints about simplification, efficiencies and renewed cost cutting. Hardly rocket science.

Further, their tendency to use the latest hype (big data! blockchain! data is the new oil! machine learning! etc) in their consultative sales model often shows their hand. They read the same stuff as everyone else, they just went to a fancy university and as you note ‘know how to wear a suit’.

Then once the PowerPoint has been presented, they go off into the wilderness after cashing their checks, or appear at another part of the company working on an unaffiliated project purely based on their connections and brown-nosing.

Has any research been done on the efficicacy of decisions that MBB consultants make in corporates? What empirical evidence is there that these consultants actually deliver value over the medium and long terms in relation to a placebo (ie the current management of a company)?

I don’t doubt they are generally intelligent and well-read, but so are a lot of internal staff and non-consultants.

Update: added last sentence, fixed some spelling errors.